I began my hardcover tour on January 9th, and it’s been an amazing experience. I’ve had the the opportunity to meet book lovers from Boston to Florida, and from Savannah to La Jolla. Each city, each event, and each person I meet touches my life in a unique and memorable way. To say I’m grateful for the experiences is an understatement. Below are some pictures of my journey.

And here I am with my girlfriend Marlane at Barnes & Noble in Cincinnati

Event at the Hudson Library & Historical Society  -  sponsored by Liz Murphy (shown on left) owner of The Learned Owl

Family!

With Page and Pallette bookseller and friend, Emily Bell. We had a blast!

With Jill Hendrix, owner of Fiction Addiction in N.C.

With Kathy Roberts (Bermudaonion’s Weblog) Kathy is now a terrific girlfriend!

This is a shadow box that my dear friend, Suz Percival from Naples, Florida, made for me!  Inside is a quote from my book (when Miz Obee pilfers marbles off the game board at the nursing home), and there’s a picture of Savannah where CeeCee walked on one of her many journeys through downtown. And yes … those are real marbles!  I just love this and will cherish it forever. Thank you Suz!

Here I am with my girlfriend Welenia Foster in Savannah!

We had a fabulous time together and I’m looking forward to seeing Welenia again.

This is a picture of my girlfriend, Gigi, and me at the ALA Conference in Boston.

And this is my girlfriend Mary (she and Gigi are friends and drove in to see me)

Friends! (L to R) Shawnee, Shauna, Steve, and Marlane

More friends! (L to R)  Sally, Suzie, Lori

Fun in Marietta, Georgia!

Author event in beautiful Hudson, Ohio

And here I am at the American Library Association Winter Conference

with Dawn, the owner of the popular book blog, She Is Too Fond Of Books

Here I am in Alabama at the Page and Palette Bookstore

with truly great Southern gals

This picture was taken at Books & Company in Dayton, Ohio on the night

I learned that Saving CeeCee Honeycutt had just become a New York Times bestseller

This is my friend Lesa who came to my author event in Plano, TX. We had a terrific time!

Here I am with Lesa Holstine who hosted a wonderfulevent for me in Glendale, Arizona

called Authors At The Teague. Lesa and I

have become great friends and I’m sad that we live so far apart.

This picture was taken at a charming bookstore in Southern Pines, North Carolina

called The Country Bookshop

I spent a wonderful afternoon in Los Angeles, California at the Ladies, Lunch, & Literacy Luncheon

This picture was taken at my author event in the gorgeous Mercantile Library in Cincinnati, Ohio

My new friend, bookseller Emily Bell at the 2009 SIBA Trade Show

It was a bitter cold day in Marietta, Georgia, but it was warm and inviting inside Sam’s Club. I was greeted with gorgeous flowers, smiles, and enough balloons to celebrate an inaugural, which in many ways this was. Pictured with me here is Lin, a wonderful woman and photographer who took care of me from the moment I entered the door to the moment I left. Lin was my ballast, and oh, did I need her!

Below are some random shots from my whirlwind adventure. I want to thank everyone at Sam’s Club and all the wonderful customers who made me feel so welcome and so special. It was a terrific day, and I made some new friends. And as you’ll see, even a few tears of happiness were shed. I’m so grateful to have had this opportunity, and, oh, what a memory its given me.

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Those laughing eyes and devilish smile are the first hints of what Jenny Gardiner is all about. She’s witty, quick, and loads of fun. Jenny is a fellow author who I wanted to highlight on my blog this month. This is the time of year when we all need some humor and much less sugar. After the holidays, when the excess of sweets and treats have taken a toll on our waistlines, and excess spending has deflated out wallets, I turned to Jenny.  Here’s what she had to say.

There is this trend for plenty of adults to seize upon post-holiday sales markdowns to acquire those gifts that somehow failed to show up under the tree on Christmas morning. Kids, too, aren’t immune to this desire—often lobbying for that one little thing that they didn’t receive, even if they got most all they’d wished for.

This year that item is Wii Fit, which didn’t Fit into our holiday budget. All in my family got plenty of lovely gifts, though, so Wii Fit would have to wait for the coffers to be replenished.

At least that’s what I thought until, on the day after Christmas, we visited my brother-in-law’s house and my teens became captivated by their game. Normally, kids being fixated on a video game is reason enough not to purchase it. Who wants their children to be perpetually tuned out, clamoring for the controllers, spending all waking hours in pursuit of mindless video game obsession? But Wii Fit actually has a purpose: to eliminate the sedentary nature of gaming, at least to some degree.

And this piqued my interest: if it could motivate kids to work out, might it also impel slacker middle-aged moms bored with their normal exercise routine to get off their butts and exercise more? So I struck a deal with my kids: since everyone wanted it so badly, we’d split the cost and get one as a post-holiday motivator. Which seemed like a great idea, until my sister-in-law Martha exposed the ugly truth about the game: the game platform—the Wii balance board—is actually a scale. As in: the thing that I’ve been hiding in my closet for years with the notion that out of sight is out of mind and thus can’t be true. Denial thy name is Jenny.

Martha went on to tell me that not only does the balance board accurately and undeniably determine your weight (probably more so than the precise scales they use to glean poundage of each item loaded onto the Space Shuttle), but the higher your BMI (body mass index), the fatter you Wii “Mii” icon gets. Seriously. So to add insult to injury, you have a Tubby Tessa avatar staring back at you from the television screen. Can we get more humiliated? It’s like a chase-me-beat-me workout. Or maybe that hairbrush spanking for getting a D in handwriting in second grade (not that that ever happened, mind you). To me, exercise really should not be mortifying, it should be gratifying. And a public flogging was not what I signed up for.

So my grand plans to get on board the Wii Fit train were immediately keboshed. Yet I’d already committed to spending my own cash to help buy the damned thing, which has led to all sorts of scheming on my part to circumvent this unpleasant, uh, shall we say, side effect of the game.

Fortunately necessity is still the mother of invention, especially when it comes to truths about which we choose to remain blissfully ignorant (despite those rotten harbingers of reality that are unavoidable, such as tight jeans). And I’ve got a plan: I’m going to make one of my kids (or perhaps one of my dogs) mount the board in my stead each time I use the game in order to get set up with the dreaded “body test,” and then I will simply ignore the taunting evidence: Wii Fit telling me I’ve got the fitness stamina of a great-grandmother, for instance. I’ll just do my thing, flap my arms, hula my hips, or whatever other silly games they have that will make me actually move, and not worry about the true number of calories burned or exact fitness level.

I felt a reprieve of guilt when I saw on Twitter a number of other women whose children had gotten Wii Fit for Christmas also trying to figure out how to outwit the scale dilemma. Clearly when evolving Wii Fit Plus into Wii Fit Plus Plus, the Nintendo engineers should consider the vanity of women world-wide and provide a way to turn off the scale temporarily, or at least, as we all do with the elliptical machine at the gym, simply lie and enter in 120 pounds when asked our weight.

Does this diminish the point to the game? Well, sort of. But can it enable me to remain cloaked in ignorance and retain some faux dignity where I so choose? You bet.

Wii Fit? No way! Wii Fat is more like it, at least if the public weigh-in is the only “weigh” to go. And in that case, this little piggy might just go wii wii wii all the way back to the gym, where I can easily lie about my weight when the exercise equipment demands an answer.

Jenny Gardiner is the author of the upcoming memoir, Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who’s Determined to Kill Me (Gallery Books, March 2010).

I can’t wait for Winging It to be released. I know it’s going to be hilarious!

Jenny’s humorous and sassy novel, Sleeping With Ward Cleaver is available at your local bookstore, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and most major booksellers.

You can visit Jenny Gardiner’s official author website here.

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I’m heading for the beautiful city of Marietta, Georgia. Why?  Because Saving CeeCee Honeycutt is the first pick for Sam’s Club’s brand new book club! On Saturday, Jan 9th there will be a big celebration to launch this exciting news. I’ll be there from noon to 2PM, signing books and chatting with readers. So if you live in the area and have time to stop by, I’d love to meet you. Here’s the address:

150 S. Cobb Parkway

Marietta, GA 30062

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